"Any kind of popular trend is infinitely more wholesome than listening to old records. It's more important that people know that some kind of pleasure can be derived from things that are around them - rather than to catalogue more stuff - you can do that forever"----Harry Smith ^^^^^^^^^^ "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may / Old Time is still a-flying / And this same flower that smiles today/Tomorrow will be dying"---Robert Herrick

Monday, November 3, 2014

not hugely invested in

Slate piece in the Future Tense series by Ari Ratner on how both dating and finance have been screwed by the internet:

"Just look at what online dating has done to the meet market. The speed and frequency of transactions has gone up. Volatility has spiked as relationship investment strategy has changed from building long-term value to quarterly—or nightly—profits. New investors have entered the market with greater ease, although all too often only to be taken advantage of by more sophisticated players. New avenues for fraud have opened up: Manti Te’o meet Bernie Madoff onAshley Madison. Even inequality has risen. Some investors are rolling in it; others have just lost their shirts. How did the bedroom end up looking so much like the boardroom?"

On the rise of a sexual-romantic equivalent to high-frequency trading:

"Sites like Grindr, launched in 2009, or Tinder, launched in 2012, give a whole new meaning to what Michael Lewis has described as “flash boys” in the financial markets. We now swipe left or right so quickly that we can’t even fully process the transactions—in this case, people—flashing across our screens. Online daters are also mirroring the move away from vanilla investments to more exotic or niche offerings."

Lots of parallels in the piece that could be teased out, to do with music consumption, music fandom, transitory cathexis, an uncoupling of listening and identification / identity formation, the muzak-ization of everything...